4 ms·

How can this have a copyright and also be GPL? Or maybe a better way of asking it is - what does a copyright even do if you give limitless permission to copy?

by kayson 3y ago

samatman 3y ago
Without a copyright, there is no GPL, because there's nothing to license.
Brian_K_White 3y ago
Copyright just asserts who gets to set the terms. GPL is just a particular set of terms. GPL never meant no copyright or no terms. In fact it sets very strict terms, just not very many, not very complicated, and not the usual ones. You never knew the basic premis or theory of how the gpl works?
- rerdavies 3y ago
  Quite right. But licensing a specification with a license designed for software is pretty darned strange. > This Specification is free software; even though This Specification is not software. And then you're left with the disturbing need to send the text of the GPL off to corporate lawyers to determine whether there are any bombs in the GPL when applied to a specification instead of a piece of software? Will implementing the specification contaminate our sources? Must we include a GPL 3 notification in our legal notices? To "modify" a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, And the corporate lawyers will respond (as they always do) that the text of the GPL wasn't written by a lawyer and nobody really knows what it means because of numerous drafting errors. Using the GPL here senselessly and needlessly causes stress, and is a more than ample reason in itself not to use the standard. The one good thing is that they used an MIT license on the reference implementation, so we won't have to use clean room protocols to write our own implementation.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    Yeah a spec should probably be one of the CC licenses.
teo_zero 3y ago
Limitless? The GPL 3 is quite specific about what you can and can't do. This opens up a new question: so this encoding will never be allowed in proprietary software?
- yau8edq12i 3y ago
  You can't copyright an idea. What's copyrighted is the text of the specification. Anybody who's made aware of the idea is free to implement it.
bux93 3y ago
Aside from very specific cases, like if you work for NASA, copyright springs into existence automatically, so even assigning it to the public domain requires some action to divest yourself of the copyright. And even then, 'moral rights' may survive. The GPL is very much not public domain, but a license to a copyrighted work though. Which, I mean, you can read it. See 'how to apply' https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html

How can this have a copyright and also be GPL? Or maybe a better way of asking it is - what does a copyright even do if you give limitless permission to copy?

by kayson 3y ago

How can this have a copyright and also be GPL? Or maybe a better way of asking it is - what does a copyright even do if you give limitless permission to copy?

samatman 3y ago

Without a copyright, there is no GPL, because there's nothing to license.

Brian_K_White 3y ago

Copyright just asserts who gets to set the terms. GPL is just a particular set of terms. GPL never meant no copyright or no terms. In fact it sets very strict terms, just not very many, not very complicated, and not the usual ones. You never knew the basic premis or theory of how the gpl works?

rerdavies 3y ago
Quite right. But licensing a specification with a license designed for software is pretty darned strange. > This Specification is free software; even though This Specification is not software. And then you're left with the disturbing need to send the text of the GPL off to corporate lawyers to determine whether there are any bombs in the GPL when applied to a specification instead of a piece of software? Will implementing the specification contaminate our sources? Must we include a GPL 3 notification in our legal notices? To "modify" a work means to copy from or adapt all or part of the work in a fashion requiring copyright permission, And the corporate lawyers will respond (as they always do) that the text of the GPL wasn't written by a lawyer and nobody really knows what it means because of numerous drafting errors. Using the GPL here senselessly and needlessly causes stress, and is a more than ample reason in itself not to use the standard. The one good thing is that they used an MIT license on the reference implementation, so we won't have to use clean room protocols to write our own implementation.
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  Yeah a spec should probably be one of the CC licenses.

teo_zero 3y ago

Limitless? The GPL 3 is quite specific about what you can and can't do. This opens up a new question: so this encoding will never be allowed in proprietary software?

yau8edq12i 3y ago
You can't copyright an idea. What's copyrighted is the text of the specification. Anybody who's made aware of the idea is free to implement it.

bux93 3y ago

Aside from very specific cases, like if you work for NASA, copyright springs into existence automatically, so even assigning it to the public domain requires some action to divest yourself of the copyright. And even then, 'moral rights' may survive. The GPL is very much not public domain, but a license to a copyrighted work though. Which, I mean, you can read it. See 'how to apply' https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html